


Oranges

by crimsonThalposis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-04-30 21:23:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14505750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonThalposis/pseuds/crimsonThalposis
Summary: M for mature themes and hinting, those looking for explicit content can move on.Every time you look at Dirk, you have to remind yourself that this is a different person. Every time he turns away it hits you again, like a shitty Doctor Who monster that just won't quit. This is Dirk. Dirk is not your Bro. Same genes, different life, different person. And then he looks at you again and the cycle begins anew.The one where Dirk figures it out. Kind of a character study of Dave in all his odd glory.





	1. Chapter 1

Dust motes hover in the air, inches from your nose. A bluebottle on the windowsill's wings flap, flap so slowly. Like they're trapped in honey, pushing against syrup. _Little Panda Fighter_ goes through the martial motions onscreen, but you haven't glanced at it for ten minutes. And of course Dirk is inscrutable behind his glasses, mouth opening so very slowly to ask if you're alright, if you're both doing okay, some shit like that. Even though it's horrible and absolutely not okay and something you would never let him do if the positions were reversed, you lift the stupid things from the bridge of his nose.

You immediately wish you hadn't. His face is lined with the kind of concern that a 21-year-old should not possess, his eyes crinkled at the corners from worry and maybe just a little bit of fear. You've become quite the Karl of reading faces, but Dirk has never had much need for expression.

Those same eyes have that odd orange pigment, something he calls a mutation forced by his odd home but you know is not, you know it isn't because in another life, far away from here, he had those same orange eyes. And whenever they narrowed like this, it was not in concern. No, it wasn't him. It wasn't him. Metal strikes metal. Needle strikes record. The glasses go back.

You hate it. You hate it so much that you slow it all down even further, submerge his words in a frame-by-frame flood of treacly snapshots. If you can keep this up, you have about fifteen minutes until he finishes his sentence. He'll be angry, though. The pose you were in before is too hard to replicate, and the Strider-English household decrees no powers. You don't really give a flying fuck at this moment.

Every single time you look at him, you have to remind yourself that this is a different person to the man who dragged you up. This dysfunctional genius has exactly zero years on you, and is still unfamiliar with concepts like public transport and popping juice cartons to scare people and remembering to give notice before just sidling up to someone and starting a conversation. This is your brother. Or technically he's your father, when you listen to Jade explain the quantum physics in as much detail as you can stand before your eardrums perforate themselves in defiance. But in all the ways that will ever count, he's your brother. More than your Bro ever was.

And yet. And yet. And fucking yet through yonder window breaks.

Every time he turns away it hits you again, like a shitty Doctor Who monster that just won't quit. This is Dirk. Dirk is not your Bro. Same genes, different life, different person. And then he looks at you again and the cycle begins anew. Which is why you're sat on his living room floor, bawling your eyes out as he encroaches the Dave-shaped patch of air on the beanbag to talk to him.

When you slip back into the timestream with as blank a face as you can manage, he is predictably pissed. His mouth just hasn't caught up.

"Dave, I can't watc-"

And then his head flicks to where you are sat, betraying no surprise because after everything that's happened he still has the reflexes of a fucking eagle. And he has the glasses. If he notices the watery stains on Jake's expensive rug, which you know he does, he doesn't mention them.

"You know the rule, Dave. Out. Home. We're talking about this tomorrow, but you need to go." It's abrupt and terse and really more than you deserve.

You don't trust yourself to to speak, so you nod. The stiffness in his shoulders, the white knuckles too loose at his sides. By breaking the one rule you respect from his dumb list, you know you've legitimately upset him for once. It's an odd feeling.

But you don't feel guilty. You see stiff shoulders and white knuckles and and irrational fear chokes you until you stop it all completely and walk home within the confines of the next second. Holding it all still for so long makes you want to throw up, which you do. Liberally.

Karkat isn't home until tomorrow. You know this. So you slow it all down to half everything and decide you're getting a full night's sleep, migraine be damned.

You haven't had a worse nights sleep since the 12th of April, 2009. But who's counting?


	2. Chapter 2

Disorientation grips you, wrenches you from the realm of sleep in a gut-churning twist that leaves you sweating and shaking in the corner of the bed. You know, even before the strange birds outside begin their dawn chorus, even before Karkat's raspy hum drifts up the stairs, that you are back in real time. It hurts.

To be honest, you hadn't expected it to work for so long. Focusing your powers whilst sleeping is a thoughtless exercise in luck, and to sleep until dawn (technically twice over) is more than you even hoped for. Now you feel tired again, but it's a friendly ache and not the absolute horror of being surfeited with life. You scare yourself, sometimes.

You stumble downstairs in a haze. It takes a moment to realise that this is literal; steam billows from the kitchen. Your boyfriend - your _boyfriend_ _, he loves_ you, _wow_  - presides over the chaos as you float over the threshold. He hates that, mainly because he was the one who suggested you stop muddying the carpet so copiously when it's not even your turn to clean it. That's fair, but you just had to amplify it. Why do you always do that?

"I thought you were dead," Karkat offers conversationally from his spot at the stove, pulling you out of your inward rambling like he always does. "Took me a hot fucking minute to realise your pulse was there, let me tell you." He appears to be boiling orange pancakes. For all their sogginess, the room smells nice when he wrestles the heat lower and the vapour dissipates just a tad. Like orange peel and cake.

Oranges. Orange eyes glaring at you, staring you down with such undisguised fucking hatred, and you shiver, and Karkat's eyebrows draw together. "Are you going to tell me what's bothering you, or are we going to asshole dance away the morning tiptoeing around it?" You're just glad you've got your aviators on, because you know how your eyes look right now. Like those of a cornered child. Are you going to be sick? Maybe. He's not smiling, but this is Karkat. Smiles are a rarer and more precious currency than this cheap fuckery.

"Aw, you remembered the asshole dance is my favourite. Nothing wrong with this cool customer," you lie, extremely blatantly and in the narrative voice you crafted for yourself when you were roughly eleven. He doesn't comment on the telltale wavering present in your voice, which for him is a laudable amount of tact. He just gives you a plate of pancakes and settles down to watch you eat, something you thought was weird until it wasn't. You'll get him back tomorrow, blow his mind with marshmallow spread on french toast. You kind of had to prompt the reinvention of marshmallows after you actually started living here, but they're really starting to catch on. Isn't that odd? So many plants and animals put back into the world and yet he had to tell someone to make marshmallows. How about mallow plants? Wait, those were already a thing. Fuck.

"Dave," Karkat remarks in a tone he must have learned from Rose, "you're mumbling." You just shrug, and he rolls his eyes with a snort. That shit beats a smile with its own Valentino handbag and spits on it. He knows this. You ask how his trip went, and he explains with liberal use of gesture, pantomime and the phrase "those _fucking_ thesmothete bureacretins" how unyielding the carapacian city planners really are. Politics, in Karkat Vantas' opinion, is the most necessary and heretic evil since his own pupation.

You could recite most of his more memorable speeches by heart, but you spend this one eating 'discount grubcakes' and appreciating the wild fervour in his eyes. The words don't matter, although they are as always impressively eloquent. What he actually talks about doesn't even matter. Warm and full and partially cheered up, you are content to trace patterns on the table and watch him wax poetic about streetlamp placement.

The interesting ambience of a troll eating something not primarily composed of insect innards almost makes you miss the ping from your back pocket.

TT: Good morning, Dave.  
TG: bonjour mon homie  
TG: you looking to kick my ass for fucking with the eggtimer at chez stridenglish y/n  
TT: Indeed.  
TT: However, I'll restrict myself to a stern scolding and a sense of angered detachment. If that's what salts your apples.   
TG: damn dirk  
TG: straightforward as ever i see  
TT:   
TG: im on my way  
TT: You don't have to pretend you're rushing, you know. The effect kind of wears off with time travel involved.  
TG: common courtesy from one manly man to another dirk  
TG: social skills more basic than karkats taste in sweaters  
TG: kind of stuff you learn as a kid like being nice and sharing your toys and not throwing up on mommys expensive lace corset  
TG: oh wait  
TT: Christ. I'm going to pretend that was innocuous.  
TG: ugh pull that stick out of your ass dirk  
TG: rinse that bad boy off for a minute  
TG: make sure its totally fit to hammer your emotional intelligence into the fucking ground  
TG: ill be there in a minute  
TT: Seriously. What in the fresh hell has gotten into you la

You don't even bother to read past that point. Or maybe you just can't, because oh woah what's this you're crying.

Depositing your phone upstairs takes a small eternity of haphazard improvisation and kicking Karkat's 'coop. Old habits, you guess.

When you zip back downstairs to your chair, his mouth is all pursed lips and stark lines and dark furrows dusted with poorly-hidden worry. "I think-"

"I think I need some fresh air."

"-you should stay home today."

You look up from the table hopefully and then swear. You haven't had an accidental lapse in expression like that in months and for all his blindness in matters of actual relationships Karkat picks it up instantly. The tactfully blank expression he'd been fostering slips into angry concern.

"No, fuck you." It is said in the kindest fashion you have ever heard. "You're not going out like this over my stiffened, decaying corpse. Mainly because you'll probably get all mopey and accidentally annihilate the space-time continuum. Now, are you going to listen to me or are you going to doing something absolu-"

"I'm going back to Dirk's."  
"The fuck you are!"  
"He wants to talk to me."  
"Then he can use social media, I don't give a fuck what obscure reason-"  
"Karkat."  
"-eriously piss in the ablution body like this, I don't give a lusus in the fifth perigee's ass whether he thin-  
"Karkat."  
"-self-important little shit if he thinks that you're in a state to be meeting and greeting instead of, like, fucking sleeping or someth-"  
"Karkat!" He breathes in and looks at you, piercing and all but panting. "Karkat, you don't need to go off on one. I'll be be back in no time, I swear."

Evidently that was the wrong thing to say. Karkat's lip curls up wryly, worried by his teeth, and he slaps your hand away when you make a noise of complaint and try to sort it out. "Look, you're bleeding." Instantly distracted, he rushes to the sink to clean the wound with closed eyes and quick sharp breaths. You make a decision. You imagine he turns around. You're already gone.

Despite what Dirk said, you do hurry, rising above the suburbs and hauling ass as fast as your bullshit powers will admit, straining to stay moving and yet hold the moment still. Every so often a tear-streaked future you will flash into existence and save you from a collision into a chimney or flying animal - you note where each one appears and try not to stare at the damp tracks too much.

At 4:13:04 you help your panting self down onto the driveway and promptly disappear. Fuck time travel pink.

You knock. When Dirk answers you are thrown off guard, as ever, by the undreadable stony expression he seems to wear like a second skin. When his left eyebrow raises a fraction at your exhaustion, you take it as a compliment and a victory. He doesn't invite you in or start shouting or give you A Look. He just stands there, arms crossed, as carefully blank and outwardly calm as ever.

Time passes. At the normal rate, mostly. The clouds speed up a little, but Dirk doesn't move. He's had a lot more practice with boredom, after all.

Sorry."  
"Sorry for what?"  
"Sorry for timing out in the house."  
"Dave. I don't give a flying fuck about that." He looks you up and down with slightly pursed lips, emanating a particular brand of neutral silence you take as extreme disappointment. "I'm legitimately worried about you...bro." It sounds ungainlyand sarcastic in his mouth, like a skittering foal on an ice rink. You wince, and shy away from further horse analogies. This is universally agreed to be the best course of action.

He pads across the hallway on silent feet to sit on the bottom step of the stairs. The carpet there is threadbare, and although he doesn't look at you (or say anything, except mumbled voice commands to his glasses), you accept the tangible invitation and step inside.

There is the quiet click of the handle as you pull the door shut behind you, and then silence. Not the true silence of a pause you have come to know so well, but the less static kind of quiet where ambling motors and ticking clocks simply don't count. By that metric, the silence truly is deafening.

You sit down.


End file.
